The Bear Shifter’s Promise

by Martha Woods

  Maybe that was why their two clans were seemingly so determined to get into another war again, they just wanted to get back to what was familiar and comfortable. Orson wasn’t ashamed to admit that sometimes in his weaker moments he had wished for a war again, if only because really it was the last time that he’d felt like a real, true success. He was terrible at growing food, at taking care of the land, but fighting? Killing? That had been something that he had worn well, and he had spent a lot of time since trying to outrun those days. It wasn’t the man that he wanted to be, and he cursed all of those that had forced that life upon a child.

  “What are you thinking about?” Jennifer asked, staring at him with eyes that seemed to pierce right into them, shining white in the moonlight, “You look like you’re lost.”

  “I think I am,” He said, scoffing to himself, “Figuratively and literally it turns out, I was just wondering… you know, how did you even end up here?”

  “Same way as you, I walked.”

  “No, you know what I mean.” Shuffling onto his side, he leaned one elbow on the cold ground. “You’re capable, you’re smart, you’re attractive, what were you doing all the way out here with a clan that doesn’t care about you when you clearly want to go out and explore the world?”

  “Oh?” She asked, a hint of warning in her voice, “And what do you know about me?”

  “I know that anyone curious enough to walk into enemy territory like they own the place is either stupid, has a death wish, or just doesn’t care. You’re clearly not stupid, and I don’t think you want to die, so that just leaves you not caring, but why is that? So many years of tension even two-year old learn not to go wandering, so the only thing I can think of is that you just have no interest in what the two of our groups think about each other.”

  “You’re assuming a lot,” She said, leaning down to match his height on one elbow, “I care about my clan, because they’re the only ones that I have left. No parents, no brothers, no sisters, nothing, the clan is all I’ve got. I don’t know a thing about what it’s like out there, and yeah maybe I want to go exploring to make my own way, but to say that I don’t care? You really don’t know anything, do you?”

  Though the fire was raging, he could feel the temperature drop by a few degrees, averting his eyes from her in embarrassment at being called out so easily. He was usually good at reading people, but occasionally he came across one that he just completely misinterpreted, and unfortunately for him this had just been one of those times. An apology was a necessity, but he was having trouble getting the words to come to mind in order to make sure that all the wrongs were called out, so that he could prove that he actually was listening.

  The thing that was stopping him, was that he didn’t know if she was being genuine or if she was just lying to cover up hurt, he was no stranger to doing that himself when someone read into him so easily, even if he hadn’t realized that what they were saying was true. She was vibrant, full of life and so caring about just about everything and everyone, the thought that she was just acting on some of that was… more than a little insulting if he was being honest, and he was genuinely sorry either way if that was the case.

  “Look just… forget about it,” She sighed, turning over onto her back, “I’m from a completely different clan, so are you, no wonder we both have no idea what it is that either of us is thinking huh?”

  “Then explain to me,” He said, leaning closer, “We’re out here together, which means that we’re in this together. I can’t ask you to trust me unless we’re both honest with each other, for both our sakes so let’s break down the walls and actually show what kind of people that we are. How are we going to stop a tragedy otherwise?”

  She looked at him like he was crazy, and it was with some irony that he realized that he very well might be. Laying out in the night in the freezing cold with a wolf for company and a slaughtered deer at his feet, nursing a chest full of broken bones because of a former friend of his trying to kill him, he could see how that could leave him with a couple screws loose. But he was sane enough still to want to know who it was that he was protecting now, and who he was sure was going to protect him in kind, so he would take that train as far as it could take him.

  “I never told you about why me and my siblings split apart, did I?” She perked up at the mention of his siblings, sure that she was forgetting something again, but her head was still swimming with the details of what had been discussed with the Elder. She’d been forgetting things over the last day, some important, some not, and she was almost sure that she had a concussion.

  “Tell me,” She said, sitting up straight and leaning towards the fire, “Maybe it’ll explain something about… all the rest of this.”

  Clearing his throat and sitting up, he warmed his hands and rubbed them in front of his mouth, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. “There were a lot of reasons that we’d grown apart over the years, and you can trace all of them back to our father. He was always making us train since the day we could walk, fighting, surviving out here, it was all a part of his big master plan for how to end the war.”

  “You didn’t like it?”

  “My father was a drunken prick, and that’s something that all of us can agree on, trust me. But he’s the reason that we survived in the end, all the training that he put us through allowed us to make it through every fight, every tragedy, keep fighting the good fight until the day that he died and the war ended.” He smirked, though it was bitter. “Funny how to end the war he ended up sacrificing himself. Pretty weird considering how selfish he was through the rest of my life.”

  Wordlessly, she placed her hand on his shoulder, seeing easily that he was in pain even now. He nodded his head gratefully, before continuing, “But that’s all the past, nothing that we can do about him now. What is important is that I’ve got three other siblings out there living their own lives, and I’m afraid still that I’ll never see them again because of some stupid argument that it turns out they were right about all along.”

  “What did you argue about?” She asked, trying to prod him along, “You still care about them so much, so it can’t have been something about any of them… what was it?”

  “It was actually about something very similar to this, the circumstances that we find ourselves in. I’d been running the clan for just about a year at that point, and tensions were still incredibly high with your clan. To top everything off we were running low on food even then, though that was due more to our inexperience at having to relearn how to farm in this terrain since all of our experts had been killed in the war. Megan she… she was not very subtle with how much of an idiot she thought of me, but in her defense she’d taken everything pretty hard compared to the rest of us. She always fought the hardest in the war, always was the first to walk out and the last to come back, so when it ended she… had a hard time getting used to everything again.”

  Jennifer was definitely familiar with that, having seen the eyes of many of her fellow clanmates, exemplary heroes in wartime reduced to hollow eyed drunks who could hardly do anything except pick up a bottle let alone try to build something new. If the war came again, no doubt all of them would jump in head first just to be something again.

  “My other brothers, they’d had it easier but there was still that difficulty you know? I was the oldest so I had the most experience to be able to get over everything, but it seemed like they were still stuck in the past. Or, well… I thought I wasn’t stuck in the past…” He shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose before he leaned back. “They told me that the land wasn’t going to last the way we were going, that we were just stripping everything that we could in order to delay the inevitable. The war had left so many scars that still haven’t healed, all the land that had been torn open and violated, and we could do nothing about it at all considering that we needed to spend all our power trying to feed ourselves.”

  “You thought differently?”

  “I thought that we just needed m
ore time to readjust to peace, that once we did we’d be able to get back to planting and flourishing like our job was supposed to be. I just couldn’t see that it was all just a big nothing that I was trying to build, five years later and the land is in the exact same condition it was then, and we’re no closer to being able to heal it than we were then. But I was stupid, and prideful, so I told them that they just needed to shut up and do what needed to be done, and eventually they would see improvements.”

  In spite of herself, Jennifer exhaled a small laugh, “I take it they didn’t like that?”

  “No, no they didn’t,” He chuckled, “They’d been trying to get through to me for months at that point, but I always brushed it aside with a ‘don’t worry, we’ll figure it all out’. I think having me lose to my own ego and tell them to just shut up and get to work… that was the last straw for them. Megan called me a dumb son of a bitch and threw a mug at my head, and the other two just sat back and watched her do it. They’d never been as… upfront with their emotions, but I could see then that they were just as pissed off as her, maybe even more so. Jamie just picked up his bag and walked right out the front door, didn’t even look back at any of us, but Shane just flipped out out of nowhere and smashed a hole in the wall, it even took Megan off guard. He said that the land was going to die, and there was nothing that I could do about it, but he wasn’t going to just sit there and watch me die as well. In hindsight, he was maybe more correct than I thought.”

  “That was five years ago?” Jennifer asked, shuffling closer, “Have you heard from any of them since, even a little?”

  “Not once, at least not with a direct greeting.” He scratched at his cheek, thinking back. “My friend got a postcard from Jamie about two years ago, but nothing came my way, he offered to let me read it but… it wasn’t for me, it wouldn’t be right, you know? If he really doesn’t want to speak to me then I should respect that, no matter how much it hurts.”

  “But they’re your family,” Jennifer insisted, “If they were mine I would never stop looking for them.”

  “The entire reason that they left in the first place was because I didn’t listen to them, because I thought that I knew better than any of them. If they mean anything to me… if I can truly say that I learned anything from this whole situation, I should at least respect their wishes to not be found, shouldn’t I? I can at least listen to them about this.”

  She considered that, and honestly he would know his family better than she would, she’d barely even heard of them before a few days ago, but there were some things that she figured were universal.

  “From the way you talk about them, it sounds like all of you were pretty close before all of this right? Otherwise they wouldn’t have left like that, reacted like they did when you disagreed with them. It sounds like they were genuinely hurt by what you did, and that’s what made them leave.”

  “Yeah, I know,” He said, bowing his head, “I think about that a lot.”

  “But that’s also the thing that makes me think that they might want to find you again, this whole situation hurt them so much, but I can only imagine that after a few years of not seeing you, if they really care about you as much as you thought they did before all this, they must want to reach out again, but they just don’t know if they can. People don’t just stop loving each other over something like this, but without being able to see that the other has changed… they probably just worry that they’ll be hurt again.”

  “But then what should I do?” He asked, “If they’re scared that they’ll be hurt again why would they reach back out when I tried? What if I haven’t changed? I could just end up doing exactly what they’re scared that I’d do anyway.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” She said, “Well, not completely. Listening to you talking about them, it’s so clear that you miss them so, so much, nothing would make you happier than to talk to them again, right? It’s so obvious that you’d be willing to do anything to make yourself atone for what you did, to make them feel like they had a home with you again, I just can’t see you falling back into that sort of arrogance as soon as they let their guard down. After all, I only met you a few days ago, but you never seemed arrogant or like you were treating me like I was an idiot. You were open, and kind, and I was a complete stranger who you could have very well never seen again, you don’t think that means something?”

  He shook his head at the compliments, but he couldn’t deny that they warmed his heart to some degree. If he could move a complete stranger, what could be considered an enemy no less, who was to say that he wouldn’t be able to do the same to his own family? Maybe he really had changed and he just wasn’t giving himself enough credit.

  “Maybe… maybe it does…” He said, resting against her shoulder, not having realized that he’d moved there, “I guess I’m just scared about what it could all mean, you know? Having to confront my mistakes like that again. It’s a wound that never really healed, for any of us, I don’t want to pick at it and make us bleed.”

  “That’s family though, isn’t it?” Jennifer shrugged. “I don’t know, I haven’t really had one most of my life, but I know that most of the time they’re supposed to be a gigantic pain in your ass that just makes you want to fucking throttle them, but in the end they’ve always got your back. Shit, all of you survived a war together, you know how many didn’t? Just because you were kind of a douche at one point doesn’t mean that they’ll hate you forever.”

  That thought was still tickling at the back of her mind, buried in a mass of fog that she just couldn’t fight through. She’d started spacing out once or twice during the conversation, shaking her head to clear her thoughts and get back to the matter at hand. But she just couldn’t stop the suspicion that there was something important about his family, something that was dire but she just couldn’t see what it was, and until she had some idea of what it was there was no point in bringing up the suspicion and causing him any needless worry, not when they had somewhere that they desperately needed to get in order to survive.

  “We’ll be getting out of here soon, and however this thing with the clans works out… why don’t you go looking for them when we do? I’m sure that they’d love to see you again, even if a couple of them are probably going to knock a tooth out of your head first, but what’s holding you back here anymore?”

  He had to admit that she had a point there, the main thing anchoring him to this forest and keeping him from them had officially gone up in smoke, and it very well literally could be doing that by the time this was all over. What was that if not the perfect excuse to move on?

  “I’ll think about it,” He said, sighing to himself, “Megan was always calling me a pussy, guess that’d be a good way to prove her wrong.”

  “And you really don’t know where they are? Not even a hint?”

  “Not a hint, but Frank might know, if anyone would its him. I don’t know if he’ll want to help me with that, same as I don’t know if he’ll want to help us with the cabin, but I can at least try to get something out of him. What have I got to lose after all?”

  She nodded, leaning forward to throw another log onto the fire before she paused, looking back at him with an eyebrow cocked in curiosity. “Should I stoke the fire more? Or do you want to get a move on? Do you think you’d be able to do that?”

  “It’s tempting to just lie here and be warm, but the cold isn’t exactly going to go away during the day. Another few sprints and we’ll get most of the way there, I doubt that they’ve stopped looking for me just yet so we need to make all the ground that we can.”

  Taking a few more minutes to bask in the warmth of the fire, letting the heat seep down to their bones, they finally stood and bagged up the meat completely in the deer skin, tying it up and hoisting it over Orson’s shoulder. If anyone had a sense of smell they’d be able to track them easily, carrying what was basically a blood marker, but they’d be damned if they were going to waste the food that had kept them alive through this whole mess.
With a regretful sigh they kicked dirt over the fire, killing it and plunging the area into darkness, their eyes adapting to the dark in a few seconds once they got used to the initial shock of it.

  “Well, let’s get going,” Jennifer said, cracking the bones in her back and stretching her legs, “We’ll take it easy, but we’ll still go quick. No sense in ruining ourselves just yet.”

  The hills and clearings were no obstacle to them, practiced legs carrying them up and down with all the ease of someone on rails, weaving through trees like they weren’t even there and leaping over rocks without even seeing them, letting instinct carry them all the way that they needed to go for as long as it could. The only momentary obstacle in their way were the rivers that they encountered about fifteen miles in, and that had been flowing so slowly that they barely even got their knees wet, shaking off the cold with the effort of running towards salvation.

  Their pace wasn’t as fast as the previous had been, spurred on by the knowledge that now they had food to fall back on if necessary, now having the energy in order to make the extended trek to the cabin without having to stop to let their bodies not collapse inwards. Orson stumbled once or twice, the pain in his ribs catching him off guard each time, but it was little more than a small distraction before they continued on, though Jennifer was starting to worry. They healed fast, it was part of what made them such formidable predators, but for him to still be bruised and in pain even now something had to be wrong. Whoever had punched him both knew how to punch the right way, and also punched hard. It was a wonder that he’d managed to get away in the first place.

  “I think… we should be about halfway,” He said, taking a moment to catch his breath against a tree, “We’re making good time, we should be able to get there in a few hours more, it’ll be no problem.”

  “Are you sure?” She asked, looking him over from top to bottom. It wasn’t a very convincing sight, sweat pouring down his forehead, skin red and bruises rising above the collar of his shirt, he looked almost in worse condition than the deer that he was carrying, and that was hardly a good sign. “You look like shit Orson.”